Books and Monographs:

• Opera before Mozart,
  Hutchinson, London 1966/2 1972/3 1978; American edn, W. Morrow, NY 1967; pp 168

[A book for students and music lovers about the social background of early opera and its artistic development. "...this scholarly and very readable survey" (British Books); "The book is excellent value" (Music and Musicians); "Dr. Robinson's excellent book clothes the skeleton with flesh and traces the growing pains of the young art-form between 1600 and 1781, the year of Mozart's Idomeneo" (The Times Literary Supplement)]

• Naples and Neapolitan Opera,
  Clarendon, Oxford 1972; American reprint Da Capo Press 1984; pp vi + 281

[A book detailing the development of opera in Naples during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. "Meticulously researched and engagingly written" (Times Literary Supplement); "At last the 'Oxford Monographs on Music' has sponsored a really first-rate piece of scholarship" (Music and Musicians)]

• The Governors' Minutes of the Conservatory Santa Maria di Loreto, Naples,
  Research Chronicle of the Royal Musical Association, x (1972), 1-97

[A monograph surveying archival evidence of the governance of one of the four Neapolitan conservatories of music between 1660 and 1800]

• A thematic catalogue of the works of Giovanni Paisiello,
  Pendragon Press, Stuyvesant, N.Y, vol 1 (1991), pp xxvi + 591; vol 2 (1994), pp xiii + 333 [with the assistance of Ulrike Hofmann]

[A catalogue providing the thematic incipits and source details of the music of the Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816). "The Paisiello volume [vol 1] by Michael Robinson and Ulrike Hofmann is not just a contribution to its field but the cornerstone on which all further research will build" (Notes)

Principal Articles:

• 'La musica italiana e la musica britannica nel xviii secolo', Accademia nazionale dei lincei publications, Rome, 1978, pp. 35-51
• 'The decline of British music. 1760-1800', Studi Musicali, Rome, vii (1978), 268-284
• 'Two London versions of The Deserter', Report of the Twelfth Congress of the IMS, Berkeley, 1977, pp. 239-245
• 'The comic element in Don Giovanni'. Don Giovanni, English National Opera Guide No 18, London, 1983, pp 7-12
• 'Mozart and the opera buffa tradition', Chapter 2 of: T. Carter, The Marriage of Figaro, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp 11-32
• 'The Da Capo aria as symbol of rationality', La Musica come Linguaggio Universale: Genesi e Storia di un'Idea, Florence, 1990, pp 51-63
• 'Opera Buffa into Opéra Comique, 1771-1790', Music and the French Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp 37-56
• 'The alternative endings of Mozart's Don Giovanni', Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp 261-285
• 'Financial management at the Teatro Caños del Peral, 1786-1799', Music in Spain during the eighteenth century, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp 29-50
• 'Luigi Serio, el primer libretista italiano de Martín y Soler', Los siete mundos de Vicente Martín y Soler, Actos del Congreso Internacional, Valencia, 2010, pp 149-166

Also articles and reviews in:

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Dizionario Enciclopedico Universale della Musica e dei Musicisti, Chigiana, Early Music, Haydn Yearbook, Musical Times, Music and Letters, Soundings, etc.